Varda finds slim pickings the best

An important part of the documentary process for Agnes Varda, 74, has been building a relationship with her subjects, writes Philippa Hawker.

Right at the beginning of The Gleaners and I, director Agnes Varda tells us how much she enjoys playing with her new camera. She uses words such as "fantastic" and "neo-realistic" to describe it.

When a bit of camera equipment strays into shots, bobbing around on a lead, she not only leaves this footage in, she makes a point of prolonging and enjoying what she calls "the dance of the lens cap".

And, speaking on the phone from Paris, Varda has plenty more to say about the pleasures and possibilities of digital technology, the delights of using a small, light, unobtrusive and versatile camera - an object, she says, "that you can hold in one hand", that allows you "to film with one hand and glean with the other".

In her film, Varda documents, with a wonderful mixture of fluidity and precision, the traditional activity known as gleaning: gathering up what remains after the harvest. She explores her subject literally and metaphorically: she looks at people picking up the potatoes; she engages in the activity herself.

Above all, she talks to individuals: scavengers, artists, urban dwellers, rural people. People with all kinds of reasons for fossicking, picking over leftovers, searching through discarded and abandoned objects: those for whom the process is an article of faith and those for whom it is an economic necessity. ");document.write("

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After all, she says, people are the subject, and the film is about the discovery of the subject. The small camera, she says, made this documentary possible, because it gave her the chance to shoot things herself. She could approach people and talk to them naturally, without the intimidating accompaniment of a crew and equipment. (She shot about a fifth of the film herself, on Mini DV. On other occasions, she used a small crew and a larger digital camera.) And she could look at her subject as she filmed, rather than being hidden behind the camera: she could have a conversation and make eye contact.

Varda, 74, made her first film almost 50 years ago. She began as a visual arts student. Before she made a film, she had seen very few movies.

One of her best-known films is Sans Toit Ni Loi (Vagabond), a 1986 drama about an enigmatic, young vagrant, which examines her life and the responses she evoked in others. But Varda has worked in fiction and in documentary, and on projects that are a combination of the two.

Her first movie, La Pointe Courte, explored the lives of a small, fishing community, and many of her cast were local people, playing themselves.

In a more recent film, Jacquot de Nantes (1991), a documentary about her late husband, the film maker Jacques Demy, she used footage of him, alongside actors playing him as a child, an adolescent and a young man.

A relationship with the subject has always been an important part of the documentary process for her.

She has often made films about communities she knows well: she sometimes incorporated herself into the film, or foregrounded the process of making movies.

Daguerrotypes, for example, is a movie set in the area where she has lived and worked for decades - the rue Daguerre, named after one of the pioneers of photography. In L'Opera Mouffe, a short film from the point of view of a pregnant woman, shot in a street in Paris, she played the woman. In Jacquot de Nantes, she made a moving tribute to her husband and his films, while in Jane B par Agnes V, her subject is Jane Birkin, and the task of making a film about a performer.

With The Gleaners and I, there is a reflection on images and image-making, on the digital camera, on the representation of gleaning in the visual arts, on the art that is made from abandoned objects, rubbish and trash.

But her subjects were a community linked by activity rather than geography: they were scattered across the country, and encountered by chance. They weren't, in general, people she knew or people who had an involvement or an opportunity to reflect on the making of the film. But she was very keen, she says, that they had the chance to see the finished product.

This wasn't always easy. She allowed the work to be exhibited at the places where she had filmed. If she didn't see people at screenings, she left a tape with welfare agencies.

The film is full of the delight, interest and respect that she brought to it, and it has a life of its own, beyond the confines of the cinema. She enjoyed her own gleaning and scavenging activities - things she found in the course of making The Gleaners and I and incorporated into it.

"Did you like my clock?" she asks, referring affectionately to something she gleaned herself, a wonderfully suggestive object - a perspex timepiece without hands, found during a hard-rubbish collection, a discarded, ostensibly useless item that she incorporates, inventively and playfully, into her home and her movie.

And, for those who feel that sequels shouldn't be the domain of Hollywood blockbusters, Varda has obliged. She has made a follow-up film, The Gleaners and I: Two Years After, in which she revisits some of the people who appeared in the film, as well as introducing some of those who contacted her after having seen it.

There are stories of change, she says, not always for the better. For some people, the intervening two years has brought distress or the break-up of a marriage; for others, there has been some kind of progress.

There is more to come in a DVD she has just finished working on, a project that includes short films about the art works featured in the documentary.

She is aware that the film has generated a strong and enthusiastic response, and says that, in some ways, she is still surprised by this.

On the surface, it is not a topic that attracts many people: "I didn't realise when I stuck my nose into it, that the subject was so strong."

And she's still amazed, she continues, by the culture of waste and wastefulness that is exposed by the simple fact of showing how much is thrown out or wasted or discarded when a commercial operator harvests potatoes in a single field.

She could have made more of this, she admits, but that's not what she wanted.

"It could have been a much more political film," she says, but she preferred that the viewer made the connections, that audiences tease out the broader implications for themselves.